Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “My brothers and I, some of the kids, raced snails on our front porch. The house across from where I live now. We’d set the snails down in a line on the porch tiles, and they’d creep forward. We each had a snail. We crawled behind the snails on our hands and knees.” Her knees had been bare and bony against the hard red tiles, and the black soot from McWanes Cast Iron Pipe Company—“fallout,” her mother labeled it—pressed into her skin while she crawled behind the snails. “We could steer our snails in a straighter path by touching the tips of their antennae.” (She remembered the tentative tenderness of their touch on the ends of those stalks. Some kids said snails carried their eyes there.) After the antennae slowly retracted, the snail would straighten its path. “They left silver trails behind that would last for days. My mother never minded.”

  “It must have taken patience to be a snail jockey.” Still, he held out the ring, his fingers curling more and more inward like a mimosa leaf closing for the night.

  “I’d take the ring,” she said, “if you meant it.”

  “Really engaged? To be married?”

  She nodded. One quick dip of the head.

  He looked away. He looked worried. But he looked back and met her eyes. “Would you like to marry me, Miss Silver?”

  She reached out and took the ring. Suddenly instead of putting it on her finger, she stuck out her tongue and put the tip of it through the ring. She drew it inside and closed her mouth and smiled for a second. She pretended she was a frog, green as the plastic ring.

  He laughed out loud, and she stuck her tongue out again. He took off the wet ring and put it on her finger.

  “There’s a hitch or two,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I’ve signed up for the Peace Corps. I’m going to Tonga, in the South Pacific, for two years. I leave in a week.”

  “We can have an engagement party before you go.”

  “It’s a long time to be separated.”

  “We’ll write.”

  “We hardly know each other,” he reminded her. Then he added with a laugh, “Maybe that’s best. Like an arranged marriage.”

  “Only we arranged it ourselves. Approximately ten-twenty-five P.M., November 22. On the 15 Norwood bus.”

  “After a chance meeting.” He stared at her. Seemed happy. “Thus,” he said, “we embrace absurdity.”

  “Yes,” she said. “No. We embrace each other.”

  They both sat still.

  “You could sign up to come to Tonga, too.”

  “I think I’d rather stay here. Maybe take some more classes.”

  The two boys and their mother from the back of the bus stood up. The mother pulled the bell cord and led her children to stand at the back door.

  The older little boy, about eight, Stella thought, with hair close cropped so she could see the beautiful egg of his skull, approached them. His eyes spread wide, he spoke to Don. “You really gonna marry this lady?”

  “Really,” Don answered.

  “With that there Cracker Jack ring?”

  “Edmund Powers!” his mother said sharply. “Get over here now and get off this bus with me!”

  Stella smiled at him. “You’re invited to come.”

  The mother pushed through the swinging door, and her children plopped out after her. “You just about got left behind, Edmund,” she said loudly from outside, a public reprimand, really an apology for her son’s intrusion.

  This stop was the last one on Vanderbilt Road. Stella imagined the family walking down the side of Stoner’s Grocery in the dark into the Quarters. The bus turned left, up Norwood Boulevard.

  “This will be my stop, next,” Stella said. She thought Don probably didn’t know exactly where she lived. She would get home intact, after all. Engaged.

  Don stood up. “The least I can do is walk my fiancée home.”

  Down the black rubber aisle Stella and Don progressed to the front of the bus. The driver pulled the door open for them—how mighty must be the muscles in his right arm, the one that worked the lever all day—and they were disgorged into Norwood.

  The empty lighted box of the bus rambled on without them up the hill of the boulevard.

  They walked down a little slope under the sweetgum tree, bare of leaves now, but they stepped on the decaying prickly balls, gone soft with a month of lying on the ground.

  Don took her hand, his fingers lacing into hers. “You do mean it, Stella?”

  Yes, yes. Let me attach my life to something, she thought. Something that lasts forever and is real. Something random because there’s nothing wrong with me. She was glad, but she could not speak. She felt caught in a revolving door: it showed her the outer world, the inner world, but she was too unreal to step away from their whirling to enter either. She felt like a ghost trapped in the unreal.

  “We can stop this anytime you want,” he said.

  Quick as that, she halted. She seemed to hear a sound like a phonograph winding down. Like disembodied voices dying of despair. She stood still—a mashed sweetgum ball under the instep of her foot—and something in her went dead.

  How could he suggest they stop? They were engaged; they had taken every step together. They had mutually agreed. Her happiness died.

  “Yes,” she said. Maybe her words could overlay his. She resumed walking. Her shoe toe scuffed through the dead sweetgum leaves, each one a brown star-shape. “Yes, I want us to marry,” she said. But she felt dead and vacant inside.

  It was useless. Why had he said they could stop? Didn’t he care? Had he no desire of his own? Was he afraid she might sue him for entrapment? At every step, they had agreed.

  But it was all right, she told herself, though he had ruined it: we can stop this anytime you like. Her soul had flared toward him, and now it struggled, shrank, and winked, as though it might sink and die.

  She walked quickly forward, toward home. He was a human being and therefore someone she could marry. A man she admired and respected. This was the way it was done in many countries. The couple learned to love each other after the promise was made.

  Her fingers were still laced into Don’s fingers. She liked that. But because he had offered to retreat from the alliance, now her hand seemed detached, turned wooden at her wrist.

  Stella glanced back quickly at the disappearing illuminated bus shouldering its way up the dark hill. Empty of passengers, it rose toward the crest of the first hill of the boulevard. Almost she could forget that it rolled on rubber tires. Almost she could imagine that it rose disconnected, immaterial, like a lighted box conveying invisible souls. She’d forgotten to read the nameplate of the driver. Her omission seemed horrible: she’d neglected to acknowledge who he was.

  Dear Self,

  —FOR SO I CALL MYSELF THIS DAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, for today I have become dearer to myself by becoming disengaged from one man and engaged to another. Until something better comes along, we both said. I felt a bit mad a good part of this historic day. I have mourned everywhere.

  All day, I’ve wandered. Perhaps I’m better suited to live in a spirit world where the members of my lost family hold up its four corners—Mama, Daddy, Ruben, and little Timothy. He’s too little to stand in the corner alone, just two years older than I was then. The four spirits of the little Negro girls visit them. My father was ever gracious, loved all children. Suffered them to come.

  Taught us to shoot.

  Even in the spirit world, I hover around the fringes, am not quite admitted.

  No. Now I am cozy in my room, and the walls keep out the world that has purposefully slain a president, randomly murdered innocent children, spawned cyclones to demolish families, created illness and suffering of every imaginable and unimaginable kind. Made us to long for a wholeness we can lose but never possess. Yet I am cozy in my room.

  On my four bedroom walls hang paintings, like shields, whose creator is none other than the man, the artist, to whom I am engaged to be married! Engaged on a well-lighted city bus plowing through the ni
ght.

  Out of the frying pan and into the fire! But so what!? And why not, if it’s what I myself choose? And if my choice hurts no one but myself.

  Does it hurt Don?

  No. For he has chosen, too. That is, if this step damages him in some way I am not guilty because the injury comes from his own willful decision making.

  I feel so naked here. Shedding guilt. Writing in my own book. It has cleared my head of the madness. I hope never again to come so close to the abyss and shall fight hard to keep my curious feet (in their olive shoes) from—

  But what of Don? And of the fact that I scarcely know him?

  Do we know life?

  No, but we marry it just the same, and whether we want to or not. It’s folly to think one can choose wisely, and so why not choose spontaneously?

  I died inside when he said we could stop whenever I liked. What did I have to do with it? I was under the illusion that we were acting on our mutual desires and inclinations. But he meant to be reassuring. Even I acknowledge his good intentions. But the sentiment doesn’t suit me. Headlong. I like headlong and no regrets. Je ne regrette rien.

  Perhaps I can’t be pleased and should simply hate myself for my failure.

  Perhaps this engagement—here’s the ring on my thumb—is a joke. An act of spontaneous theater—merely amusing. No! I infuse it with meaning. We were not joking. Or, the joke has evolved, broken the back of its hard chrysalis to flutter forth, transformed. Until. Unless.

  Don’s paintings hang around me in the dim light of this bedroom. They have come unnamed, like children, but I name one, done only in shades of brown and tan, The Nile River Sideways, for it resembles a kind of crack in the earth, with tributary cracks. Sideways, because it divides its space horizontally, though I always think of the Nile as south-north, vertical, parting the desert. And another I name Opulent Odalisque, for it is touched with gilt, and while the forms are all abstract ovals, they seem to recline on one another rather like a woman might lounge back into unbelievable wealth. Well—

  REALLY IT IS NOT the paintings but this dim light filtering into my chamber that swaddles me and asks for words.

  My room is not all inwardness, for light from the streetlamp filters through the shades, and I remember how at night in the summer long ago I played under the streetlight with the neighborhood kids and my brothers. With Ruben (which means “firstborn” in Hebrew, doubtlessly named so by my mother) and Timothy (as in the books of the New Testament, no doubt read and loved by my Methodist father with his true-hawk nose and the red spider veins emanating at the juncture of nostril-flange and face). But I was writing of playing hide-and-seek outside at night, and something in me rejoins those shadow children.

  I have fallen down, and so have taken time out to sit on the curb and press my elbow with my skirt. I am five, and I have not guessed that I am more than brushed by my encounter with the pavement. Yet when I look at my skirt, I have printed it with blood from my skinned elbow. I have printed three shapes, like hearts, on my skirt as I pressed my elbow against the cloth of my skirt.

  My elbow was still covered—I remember—with a thick scab when the car rolled, and they were killed. But I don’t want to think of that. A young doctor in the hospital asked me, “How are you today?” And I must have said fine because then he asked if I knew what had happened. I said I had played too rough and skinned my elbow. I showed my old scab to him.

  I must have been a little out of it then, but I will not think about that. It was long ago.

  I’m here in my room at my aunts. Aunt Krit, never married, the maiden schoolteacher, peculiar. (I could become her.) Aunt Pratt, older, widowed, a mother but her son lost, a deserter from war, half mad with anxiety about him and the arthritis that leaves her bedridden. (I will not become her, except for her brave love for whoever crosses her path. For me.) The same streetlight shines through the shades, and I can see the abstract paintings of my beloved looking in on me as though they hung on the walls of my mind. I have escaped the city, the world of accident and murder. I dwell not in the house of the Lord forever and ever, but in the room of my mind, here in the house of my aunts.

  But what was it I wanted to say when I began to write in my book? That I am here and safe.

  That’s not enough. The people of my city—so many people feel…So many do not imagine him as a human like themselves. What I realize is that I still love these people. I am apart from them—I feel so lonely!—but this city is my home and they are my people.

  Why am I more slain by assassination than by the murder of four Negro girls?

  There is something wrong with my heart. I will change myself.

  My heart convulses with sadness and terror.

  Oh, I see a dark house! I know that desolate house. It is next door, the one I grew up in. And the day before Aunt Krit sold it, she invited the neighbors to come and look around for anything they wanted to take. Then she sat in this house, with our lights out, and she called to me, “Come see, Stella. They’ve come with their torches.”

  Torches, she said, and I was alarmed because I thought they might be about to burn the house down, from the inside. I thought it ruthless of her to discard the furniture, ruthless to sell the house. These days she mumbles about the Negroes at Helicon, how they may be trying to establish squatters’ rights on her property.

  But what she meant by torches was flashlights, and I saw the beams of light shooting through the dark house at strange angles. It was as though the house was being skewered by light beams. I sat down beside her on the daybed that was against the windows. We looked out across the driveway, black as the river Styx, and she held my hand.

  “Must you sell the house?” I asked in a small voice.

  “I’ll need the money, saved at compound interest, to send you to college.”

  She was the person who told me of the massacre of the Jews. Of the camps and the ovens. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching a faucet drip, I found her information too terrible to believe. Though I respected her, I reserved a corner of doubt. Of course she told the truth, in spite of my childish disbelief. Perhaps my incredulity was pride. How could she know so much more than I?

  I’m tired and must sleep. I’ve had my day. I ventured from this bed and had a day of wandering and of planned commitments. A phantasmagoria of voices and visions and revisions. Of cruelty and kindness. A new engagement.

  What do I love about Don? His posture—the way he walks in the world. That’s almost enough. But his wit, too. His kindness to Cat and to me. That he paints.

  But what was that I wanted to remember? That I must change my life. The deserted house and the shafts of light prying everywhere.

  Lionel Parrish: Letter to

  the Four Families, December 1

  BECAUSE IT IS THE CHRISTMAS SEASON WHEN FAMILIES draw near to one another, I am thinking of you & of the missing member of your families. If I had the power to undo what has been done to your loved one, or to undo your own grieving & the vacancy in your heart, I would do so.

  But my power is small. In my kitchen, my wife & our four children have gathered to make five loaf fruitcakes, which I am sending you with this letter, & one to Mrs. Kennedy. Do not be afraid to eat them. They are stuffed with goodness. We have folded both pecans & walnuts, citron & dates into the batter. Each one has done their part, even my youngest, little Andy. He has taken the paring knife & the cherries & held a candied cherry down on the cook-top & carefully sliced it in two, time after time.

  May your hurt hearts be mended as you celebrate the child God sent at Christmastime to make us whole and free of sin through his sacrifice if we but believe and trust in him.

  Please enjoy these good cakes we have baked. God is serving his own cakes in heaven where all the family eats at one table.

  With Christian Love and Hope,

  Lionel & Jenny Parrish. Children George, Lizzie, Vicky &

  Andy (his mark)

  Edmund’s Memoir:

  A Christmas Story in Retrospe
ct

  CHRISTMAS EVE AND I REMEMBER WATCHING MY MAMA sit up in the bed; the light from the fireplace caught the oil on her high cheekbone. Papa’s place was still empty. Mama was going to look round now. Yes, she did. I saw the whites of her eyes move round, and I closed my eyes loosely, not screwed up tight like I did when I was five.

  Was brother Alfie asleep? And Sis Margaret Rose and little Willy? Their knees were pulled up and they lay rounded and natural. The quilts were up to their ears. Would my big brother Charles come visit for Christmas? Mama walked barefooted to the fireplace. Her white soles flickered under her feet like she was walking on light. She picked up a lump of big coal and laid it down into the glow. The embers shifted, breathed, and poo-pooed ashes. Mama looked round mean, scowling, right at me. But I didn’t show any life.

  She went back toward her bed and I thought, Where’s my Christmas roller skates? Gimme my skates. Mama! Mama! She lifted back the quilts and got into her hollow. She was pulling the covers over her shoulder and then she was turning over, facing the wall and the space where my daddy should have been. I exhorted her to get up and find my skates. And Margaret Rose’s white majorette boots. And Alfie—he’s old enough to know. Never mind about Willy. I didn’t ask for no bicycle. Nothing but roller skates. Bright and shining. When you hold a skate on its back and turn a wheel with your finger, click-click-click, it’s got tiny little balls inside.

  I dreamed that my mama was an angel that Christmas Eve long ago, an angel walking on light, her feet glittering, and then I saw it was because she was riding my skates. She skated all night; sometimes I said, Watch out, Mama, watch out. White man’s gonna get you.

  I was prescient in my dream, like a prophet of old.

  Finally Mama fell, and her stumbling was like the little bells when you walk in the grocery store to buy a Moon Pie, like when you used to walk into Stoner’s store on Vanderbilt Road and could walk into now, if the store were still there, after all this time.